Dan Chiasson

In the late nineteen-fifties, when she was in her seventies, Marianne Moore became a star. She went on the “Tonight Show” to talk about the Brooklyn Dodgers with Jack Paar. The elderly poet was profiled in Sports Illustrated and featured on the cover of Esquire, with Jimmy Durante, Joe Louis, and others. George Plimpton picked her up in a limousine at her home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and escorted her to a game at Yankee Stadium. Plimpton also introduced her to Norman Mailer, whom she adored, and to Muhammad Ali, at that time Cassius Clay. It is hard to imagine any other high modernist—Ezra Pound, say, or Wallace Stevens—writing the liner notes for Ali’s spoken-word record, “I Am the Greatest,” as Moore did. Only occasionally did the attention become too much. “I am being obliterated by trespassers,” she said of the strangers who appeared at her door after Time published directions to her home.

“Stay, Illusion,” the title of Lucie Brock-Broido’s new book of poems, her fourth in twenty-five years, is borrowed from Horatio’s fruitless command to the ghost of King Hamlet. Illusions don’t stay, of course—that’s how we know they were illusions—but poets often talk directly to them anyway. Brock-Broido’s poems, haunted by old words and meanings, full of occult spells and curses, nearly Pre-Raphaelite in their taste for gilt and gaud, have much to say to the dead. Her work offers autobiography not as memoir—the chosen mode of so many American poets—but, rather, as grimoire.

I learned that Seamus Heaney had died from a New York Times push notification, a feature on my phone that I keep intending to turn off. It was the saddest I have been about a poet’s death since the death of James Merrill, in 1995, which I learned about, also upon waking, from the NPR broadcast that served as an alarm on my clock radio. Poets place their voices inside our heads, so close to our thoughts that it feels as though we’ve thought them up. It is odd when they make the news, which they do only occasionally, and only by making it very big, by winning the Nobel Prize, as Heaney did, and by dying. It is like learning from the media something secret about yourself, something you thought you’d kept well hidden.

Heaney’s poems were full of finds, unlikely retrievals from the slime of the ground or the murk of history and memory. His poems about peat bogs and what they preserve are probably the most important English-language poems written in the past fifty years about violence—the “intimate, tribal revenge” that underscores the news. But they never stray an inch from the personal tone that Heaney honed in his poems about his four-year-old brother’s death or his mother’s method of slicing potatoes into soup. That the same vocabulary, the same notes, and the same intelligence could govern his personal poems and his political ones only pointed to the arbitrariness of the distinction.

Yesterday’s tragic events in Boston left many without limbs and some without their loved ones, so now is not the time for eloquence. But at times of tragedy, the mind goes to certain favored zones; mine goes automatically to poetry.

Certainly there are great poems about the city of Boston and about tragic explosions but none of those feel suited to this moment; nor do any of the countless poems written after 9/11. I can think of one poem that feels right for this moment (readers will help me think of others, I am sure)—but first I need to say what kind of moment this is, for me.

I have a candidate for the author of the most interesting contemporary English sentences, and he is not primarily a prose writer: the American poet Carl Phillips, who has published fourteen books in the past twenty years. Poets work primarily in lines, and often dream of writing perfect ones; this is why every poet is an innovator of sentences, dissecting them, ranking them, scattering, by means of line and stanza breaks, little cliffhangers across their lengths. Phillips’s signature poem is one of short lines and stanzas, which a few long sentences must traverse, like wary pioneers fording a wide river. His poems don’t so much conclude as arrive; they impress us, often, not by being conventionally beautiful or sage but by making it across the jagged terrain Phillips has laid out for them.

It is fifty years since Sylvia Plath killed herself, in her flat in London, near Primrose Hill, in a house where William Butler Yeats once lived. She was thirty-one. Her two children, Frieda, age three, and Nicholas, barely one, slept in the next room. Plath jammed some rags and towels under the door, then turned the gas on in the oven and laid her head inside. She was separated from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, who had betrayed her; raising the children was left almost entirely to her. She wrote several dozen of the most extraordinary poems in the English language within the span of a few months, before the children awoke at dawn.

The care with which she prepared her own death scene, leaving out mugs of milk for the children, is the work of a person whose talent for hospitality never left her, though it took a macabre turn. This care extended to her book. On her writing table, she left a black spring binder that contained a manuscript she had completed some months earlier, “Ariel and Other Poems” (she had scratched out alternate possibilities: “Daddy and Other Poems,” “A Birthday Present,” and “The Rabbit Catcher”) and, beside it, a sheaf of nineteen additional poems that she had written since. Hughes published a book he called “Ariel,” derived from the manuscript, with the newer poems added, in 1965. Robert Lowell, who contributed a forward, is said to have exclaimed, when he opened and read the manuscript, “Something amazing has happened.”

Poetry is innately related to theft. The lyre was invented, the Greeks tell us, by Hermes, who then gave the instrument to Apollo as compensation for stealing cattle. One reason people’s aversion to poetry sometimes passes over into strong annoyance, or even resentment, is that poems steal our very language out from under us and return it malformed, misshapen, hardly recognizable. Poetry carries us to odd places, almost like the prank, allegedly popular a few years ago, in which somebody steals your garden gnome and sends you postcards of it from points spanning the globe—the Blarney Stone, the Pont-Neuf.

Louise Glück has been publishing poetry for nearly fifty years. This may be some kind of record, since it reflects not great age but uncommon precocity: she is not quite seventy. Her poems are flash bulletins from her inner life, a region that she examines unsparingly. Outside her poems, much noisy history has occurred, this past half century. Inside them, you find, X-rayed by an unusually analytic mind, only the kinds of thing that Emerson once said a poet needed: “day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions.” Though she has won almost every major award in poetry (including the Bollingen Prize, probably the most prestigious of them all) and served, in a wincing sort of way, a term as Poet Laureate, Glück does nothing very venturesome: she teaches (at Yale and in the Boston University Creative Writing Program, where we are now colleagues), reads mystery novels, gardens, and cooks. She has suffered more than some, less than many; she has nothing uniquely harrowing to report. If someone told you to make fifty years of poetry out of what Glück has kept on hand, you would say, No, I’m sorry, that’s not possible.

American poets often seem prone to a kind of New World bad mood, a booby-trapped candor that draws us in to trip us up. Open Walt Whitman to any page and you will find traces in his camaraderie of this inexplicable testiness (“Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? / Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening”), as though somehow, somewhere, you’d done him wrong. Emily Dickinson is flirty but barbed, torn between her “Playfellow Heart” and a “Heart that goes in, and closes the Door.” Marianne Moore’s armored creatures use their beauty as a defense against predators; Wallace Stevens’s “Harmonium” keeps us off balance with its comic tantrums. And then there is Sylvia Plath, whose mingled curses and seductions can make other poets seem like Velveeta. Plath’s readers suffer the same sadistic glee that she describes in “Daddy,” that “love of the rack and the screw.” Her sublime unfairness to everyone and everything, herself first of all, makes her at once impossible company and impossible to resist.

The Library of America has just published “The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard,” edited by Brainard’s friend and biographer, the poet Ron Padgett. Brainard is one of those figures—in his art, his writing, and, one gathers, his person—whose primary genius was to give long-sought relief from overbearing works of art, pieces of writing, and people. For their friendliness, their air of openness, their distaste for guile and pretense, Brainard’s productions have a soothing quality; the other “New York School” writers and artists seem almost reverent and self-serious next to him.

He is better known as an artist: a maker of frisky collages, a painter of exquisite male nudes, an assembler of miniatures. But he wrote beautifully, especially in his iconic connect-the-dots memoir, “I Remember.” This is the book that launched a thousand creative writing exercises, but its simple form—a hundred and fifty-five paragraphs of various lengths, all beginning with the phrase “I Remember”—is still, when you revisit it, a stark surprise. I would make a case for “I Remember” as one of the twenty or so most important American autobiographies, important for its air of unimportance and for its mingling of cultural bric-a-brac with sexual frankness and self-revelation.